First the blog, then the infamous wiki… now David Miliband is getting into the podcasting game. He’s doing a series of short down-the-line interviews with The Guardian, from the UN’s climate change conference in Kenya. As ever, Miliband comes across very well, keen to engage with the general audience (helped, it must be said, by a fairly soft interviewing style). The audio files are MP3s in moderate quality only, fair enough given the poor quality of the phone line from Nairobi.
I can’t help feeling a bit uncomfortable with the ‘podcast’ label. It’s a series of standard journalist-with-minister interviews, which wouldn’t be the slightest bit remarkable if they were done on a radio programme. But the distribution via MP3 and RSS, through a non-broadcaster (in the traditional sense) gives it some novelty value.
Ross Finnie, the environment minister in the Scottish Executive, sees his audio and raises him some video, though. Granted, it’s a scripted piece-to-camera, less than two and a half minutes – and filmed before he left. But it’s good to see these early attempts at video nonetheless.